Quote of the Day | August 8, 2008: Imperishable Moments of Immortality

George Plimpton's essay, "Gods," from The Gospel According to ESPN: The Saints, Saviors, & Sinners of Sports, 2003.

The former baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti believed that human beings played games from the earliest times not to please or appease the gods, but rather "we have played games and watched games to imitate the gods, and to become godlike in our worship of each other, and, through these moments of transmutations, to know for an instant what the gods knew, whether celebrated by Pindar or Roger Angell . . ."

He mentions a scholar named Allen Guttman, who points out: "Once the gods have vanished from Mount Olympus or from Dante's Paradise, we can no longer run to appease them or to save our souls, but we can set a record. It is a uniquely modern form of immortality.

I think I understand that. We have the need to re-create the instant of immortality by talking about it (locker-room chat about the brilliant birdie scored on the 10th), reading about it (ten pages of a sports section or a sports magazine), hoping to see it (one of tens of thousands attending the Olympics or a World Series), or watching via some representative form such as movies, television, tapes. Indeed, we are either the happy few who can do great feats beyond our own gifts, or surely we are among the vast number of grateful (and indeed, somehow immortalized ourselves by being on hand) to witness what they do. Thus many of us carry "visions" around in our minds -- Bobby Thomson's "shot heard 'round the world," Secretariat winning the Belmont by 31 lengths, Jesse Owens's 100-meter dash in Berlin, John Havlicek stealing the ball, Henry Aaron beating the Babe's homerun record -- imperishable moments of immortality. Of course, a vision of delight is at the same time a nightmare for someone else -- a Dodger fan in the case of the Thomson pennant-winning home run in the Polo Grounds, a horse called Sham beaten by 45 lengths in the Belmont, Adolf Hitler at the Berlin Olympics, the Philadelphia 76ers when Havlicek swiped the ball with a few seconds left to preserve one of the Boston Celtics' many championships.

Tags: George Plimton, Gods, Saints, Saviors, & Sinners, George Plimpton on Sports